Daily Archives: February 5, 2016

Saudi Arabia Diving into Islamic State War?

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Carter: Saudis to Contribute More in Counter-ISIL Fight

WASHINGTON, February 5, 2016 —The Saudi Arabian government has indicated its willingness to do more with the coalition in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said yesterday at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.

Speaking with reporters after addressing airmen at the Air Force installation, Carter said he looks forward to discussing contributions to the accelerated anti-ISIL fight with the Saudis and 25 other nations next week in Brussels.

“The United States has very much indicated our desire to accelerate the campaign to defeat ISIL, [and] we’ll do that better, and it’ll be easier to sustain the defeat … if other countries that are part of the coalition accelerate their efforts at the same time,” Carter said.

Positive Contribution

Saudi Arabia also has said it’s willing to take the lead in marshaling some Muslim-majority countries, he added, noting that the local population in Syria and Iraq will sustain the defeat of ISIL.

“The Saudis indicated that they and other countries would be best positioned to help make those arrangements,” the secretary said. “I think that’s a very positive contribution as well.”

On other contributions, Carter said the Dutch also have said they are willing to join in the counter-ISIL campaign in Syria, as they have done in Iraq.

“So you see others stepping up,” he added, “and the reason I’m going to Brussels next week is to bring the full weight of the coalition behind accelerating the defeat of ISIL.”

Budgetary Priority

To the airmen in Nevada, Carter previewed the Air Force portion of the fiscal year 2017 DoD budget proposal, noting that the Pentagon is adding another $1 billion over the next five years for the kind of training available at Nellis, home of the Air Force Warfare Center.

“Nellis is incredibly important to the Air Force, now and in the future, [and] they can expect increased investments in the quality of the range, in the intensity of the training, the number of exercises conducted here, the variety of aircraft that will be coming here and will need to be maintained here,” Carter said.

“This is a critical place,” he added. “It’s going to stay a critical place, and it’s going to get budgetary priority. The key is readiness — that’s the key to the Air Force today and tomorrow.”

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Saudi Arabia vs Iran: The view from Turkey, stuck in the middle

ISTANBUL – Turkey should avoid picking sides in the current diplomatic crisis between Saudi Arabia and Iran, according to experts.

“I hope that Turkey doesn’t feel that it needs to rush in and take sides in this issue. It’s not in the interests of the region that everyone lines up on one side or the other,” said Stephen Kinzer, a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies and a former bureau chief for the New York Times in Istanbul.

Sunni-majority Saudi Arabia terminated diplomatic ties with its longtime rival Iran, which has a Shi’a majority, on Sunday following an attack by protestors on its embassy in Tehran. The protestors, who the Saudi foreign minister said were supported by the Iranian government, were angry at Saudi Arabia’s execution of prominent Shi’a cleric and critic of the Kingdom Nimr Al-Nimr on Saturday.

“This certainly heralds a more acute period of confrontation between the two,” said Sinan Ülgen, former Turkish diplomat and chairman of The Centre for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies in Istanbul.

Turkey, majority-Sunni, has relations with Saudi Arabia and Iran, and has called for restraint from both sides. Ankara criticized Saudi Arabia for “political death penalties” without specifically mentioning Nimr, and said Iran must protect all diplomatic missions in its country, calling the attacks on the Saudi embassy “unacceptable.”

Ülgen told The Media Line that since the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the ensuing instability, “we have seen a rise in sectarian tension between Tehran and Riyadh.”

However, both Ülgen and Kinzer say that dismissing the conflict purely as religious sectarianism is overly simplistic.

“Sectarianism is being used as a façade, behind which Saudi Arabia and Iran are jousting for power in the Middle East,” Kinzer told The Media Line. “Basically these are the only remaining powers in the [region]. You’d like to think the Middle East is big enough for both of them, but it doesn’t seem that way.”

El Chapo’s America: Flooded with Heroin-Fentanyl

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The DEA operation, called “Project Cassandra,” is meant to disrupt and dismantle Hezbollah’s global network that supplies drugs to the U.S. and Europe as well as cut into the terror organization’s ability to fund its activities through drug trafficking.

In the investigation, authorities uncovered a network of money couriers who collect and transport millions of euros in drug proceeds from Europe to the Middle East. The currency is then paid in Colombia to drug traffickers using the Hawala disbursement system, which makes it difficult to track. ***

Last spring, Brazil’s Civil Police arrested Hamzi Ahmad Barakat in the city of Curitiba under allegations that he had connections to a network of front companies that fleeced Lebanese immigrants who had recently moved to Brazil.

Barakat, who allegedly has ties to the infamous Triple Frontier region, is listed in the United States as a member of Hezbollah and is suspected of trafficking arms, drugs, explosives and counterfeit bills.

“He was preying on his own countrymen, using their identities to create companies to carry out schemes,” said Cassiano Aufiero, the police investigator in charge of the case.

Aufiero added that while he knew of Barakat’s purported ties to the Islamic militant group, he said that he was under arrest for different matters, including embezzlement and the creation of false documents.

Barakat’s arrest shed more light on the Triple Border region, which has become a hotspot for smugglers and drawn the attention of the U.S., Israel and governments throughout South America.

The region has drawn a number of immigrants for the Middle East, particularly from Lebanon, and is believed to be one of Hezbollah’s major areas of operation outside of the Islamic world, due to its seclusion, loose borders, rampant political corruption and weak judicial system. Brazil has one of the largest Lebanese population’s outside of Lebanon with at least 7 million people from that country residing there and some estimates claiming closer to 13 million.

In 2004, Barakat’s brother, Assad Ahmad Barakat, was named by the Treasury Department as one of Hezbollah’s “most prominent and influential members” and was believed to have used an electronics wholesale store in the Triple Frontier as a cover for raising funds for Hezbollah. The Brazilian police arrested him in 2002 and deported him to Paraguay, where he went to prison for tax evasion.

The Department of Justice National Drug Threat Assessment report.

Fentanyl: drug 50 times more potent than heroin ravages New Hampshire

Of 69 fatal overdose victims last year, 68% had taken the synthetic opioid, which Mexican cartels have learned to make and smuggle to interstate highways. The drug ‘is what is killing our citizens,’ says Manchester’s police chief

Guardian: to the Drug Enforcement Administration, fentanyl is a synthetic opioid 100 times more powerful than morphine, and 30-50 times more powerful than heroin.

“Fentanyl is what is killing our citizens,” said Manchester’s chief of police, Nick Willard, in testimony before Congress last week.

In 2013, the city of Manchester had 14 fatal overdoses, one of which (7%) involved a victim with fentanyl in their system, according to Willard. In 2015, 69 people fatally overdosed, 68% of whom had taken fentanyl. The state statistics are no more cheery. Officials at the office of the chief medical examiner in New Hampshire say they have yet to receive testing results from 36 suspected overdoses, but they’ve counted 399 fatal overdose victims so far, more than two-thirds of whom died with fentanyl in their system.

“It’s not like Mario Batali,” said Willard from his office in Manchester, comparing heroin dealers cutting their supply with the famed chef. “These guys are just throwing it in a mixer. You could get a bag that’s perfect and no one is going to die from it. You could also get a bag [that’s] straight fentanyl and that would kill you.”

Willard said that during a recent raid in Manchester, he found a dealer mixing fentanyl with whey protein. In another sting that led to a seizure in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the dealer was allegedly mixing heroin and fentanyl in a kitchen blender.

For the most part, said Willard, the story of opiate use in Manchester follows the same patterns as the rest of the country. The crisis was ushered in by the rise of prescription painkillers like OxyContin. Addicts looking for a cheaper high frequently turned to the more dangerous, yet significantly cheaper, heroin.

The turning point, he says, happened sometime after 2010, when Purdue Pharma altered the medication to make it more difficult to tamper with and get high. Suppliers in Mexico were quick to keep up with the burgeoning market, and addicts in Manchester, which sits near Interstate 93, Route 3, Route 81, and Route 9, had no problem tapping into the supply. More here.

Chicago:

“What Al Capone was to beer and whiskey, Guzmán is to narcotics,” Art Bilek, the commission’s executive vice president, said at the time. Except, Bilek added, Guzmán “is clearly more dangerous than Al Capone was at his height.” (Zambada is plenty dangerous, too: Prosecutors say he commanded logistics and security for the cartel, including assassinations. He is suspected in a number of slayings, including the murders of government officials.)

The cartel’s scope is staggering. About half of the estimated $65 billion worth of illegal cocaine, heroin, and other narcotics that Americans buy each year enters the United States via Mexico, according to law enforcement experts (though the drugs often originate in South or Central America). More than half of that is believed to be supplied by Sinaloa. Drug enforcement experts estimate, conservatively, that the cartel’s annual revenues exceed $3 billion: more than those of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group.

In Chicago, the cartel has a near monopoly. “I’d say 70 to 80 percent of the narcotics here are controlled by Sinaloa and Chapo Guzmán,” says Jack Riley, director of the DEA’s Chicago office. “Virtually all of our major investigations at some point lead back to other investigations tied to Sinaloa.”

In August 2009, five months after Zambada’s capture, a federal grand jury in Chicago indicted him and 45 others tied to a Sinaloa-led drug ring in the city. Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney at the time, called the indictments “the most significant drug importation conspiracies ever charged in Chicago,” claiming that the cartel imported and distributed nearly $6 billion worth of illegal narcotics mostly to the Chicago area between 1990 and 2008.

Terror Ties Vetting Prison Chaplains

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Federal Prisons Using Groups With Terror Ties To Vet Islamic Chaplains

DailyCaller: As Fox News and other news organizations have reported, America’s federal prisons are a “breeding ground” for potential Islamic terrorists — and have been so for years. Despite this disturbing trend, the Obama administration has enlisted Islamic organizations with known terror ties to review and endorse chaplains to work in federal prisons.

In response to an inquiry from Republican Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Federal Bureau of Prisons provided a list of Islamic Chaplaincy Endorsers, which Grassley has since posted online. Included on the list is the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which has long-standing ties with the Muslim Brotherhood and was named by the Justice Department as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror financing case.

In an open letter to the director of the Bureau of Prisons Thomas Kane, Grassley pointed out that “A 2009 federal district court ruling concluded that ample evidence exists showing the Islamic Society of North America’s ties to Hamas, which is designated by the State Department as a terrorist organization.”

Writing about ISNA, Grassley noted: “It appears, therefore, that the BOP is relying on an organization with associations to terrorist organizations and one that the DOJ named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a terrorist financing case to confirm credentials of those attempting to provide religious services to federal inmates. If accurate, this information is deeply troubling.”

And ISNA isn’t even the only organization with radical ties on the list of chaplaincy endorsers. The Islamic Education Center, located in Walnut, Calif., also has ties to terror organizations through its founder, Dr. Ahmad H. Sakr.

In addition to founding the Islamic Education Center, Sakr — originally from Lebanon — was a founding member of both ISNA and the World Council of Mosques, the latter of which has “a long history of providing financial support to terrorist groups,” according to the Anti-Defamation League. Sakr, who passed away just a few months ago, is listed as the contact person on the BOP’s list of chaplaincy endorsers.

“It is imperative that the BOP take every measure possible to ensure the safety of its personnel within federal prisons and take all reasonable measures to ensure that Islamic extremism is stopped at the gates of each prison,” Grassley noted in his letter to Director Kane. “Currently, it is not clear whether the BOP is doing so.”

As a result of the apparent shortcomings, Grassley is asking the Bureau of Prisons to provide further information about “the process by which someone becomes a religious endorsing organization,” in addition to an explanation for why the BOP chose ISNA as a chaplaincy endorser.
Grassley is also seeking the number of currently employed religious contractors from the 2014-15 year with still incomplete background checks.

According to a 2013 article from the Huffington Post, anywhere between 35,000-40,000 inmates convert to Islam every year, presumably with the assistance of the chaplains provided by the prisons. In a 2014 op-ed in The Daily Caller, author Joy Brighton argued that the nation’s prisons have been churning out thousands of radicalized inmates every year. Brighton’s calls were echoed in a Fox News article just last month that cited experts on the subject who called federal prisons a “breeding ground” for potential terrorists.

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In 2003 for the Inspector General:  On March 10, 2003, Senator Charles Schumer wrote a letter to the OIG requesting that we examine the BOP’s process for selecting Muslim chaplains based on concerns that the BOP relies solely on two Islamic groups to endorse its Muslim chaplains, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences (GSISS). Schumer noted that the ISNA and the GSISS allegedly are connected to terrorism and promote Wahhabism, which some consider an exclusionary and extreme form of Islam. In addition to Senator Schumer, Senators Jon Kyl and Dianne Feinstein expressed similar concerns and asked the OIG to examine these issues as they relate to the BOP.

In response to these requests, we reviewed the recruitment, endorsement, selection, and supervision of Muslim chaplains and other Muslim religious services providers who work with BOP inmates. We also examined the roles the ISNA, the GSISS, and other organizations have in the endorsement of chaplain candidates.

During this review, the OIG interviewed the BOP’s ten Muslim chaplains, the BOP detailee to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) National Joint Terrorism Task Force (NJTTF), and officials at BOP Headquarters who are responsible for religious services providers, including the Chief of the Chaplaincy Services Branch and the Senior Deputy Assistant Director (SDAD) of the Correctional Programs Division. We also interviewed FBI counterterrorism officials and representatives of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom at the U.S. Department of State (Commission). Full report here.

From GatesStone: The number of Muslim prisoners in Britain has doubled in the last decade to nearly 12,000. Many of these prisoners, the media reports, are at “significant risk” of radicalization. The solution, authorities claim, lies with the Islamic prison chaplains. Or are they, in fact, part of the problem? Where do these chaplains come from? What sort of Islam are they espousing?

On May 12, the BBC broadcast its own investigation into the radicalization of prison inmates. The documentary featured interviews with former inmates such as Michael Coe, who “went into prison as a gangster and left as Mikaeel Ibrahim, a convert to Islam.” Coe attributes his conversion to his friendship in jail with al-Qaeda terrorist Dhiren Barot, jailed for life by a British court in 2004 for plotting to blow up limousines by packing them with gas canisters. Full article here.

For more facts on the matter: Why Extremist Chaplains Have Access to U.S. Prisons

 

Christian Patrols vs. Islamists in England

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Britain First, Fighting Back, what is real on the streets on London and the suburbs. Courtesy of BritainFirst.org.

In towns like Ulster, Dewbury, Rotherham and Luton it is Chritians versus Islam where Britain First is taking a stand to reclaim their country. England is full of ‘no-go’ zones where  the corrupt government has relinquished sovereignty to a violent culture and ideology.

Jayda Fransen, Deputy Leader of Britain First podcast: